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If legacy apps are incompatible with modern operating systems, it can lead to disaster for an organization. It could even expose security vulnerabilities.
This blog post will explain how to modernize legacy apps and the process involved.
Legacy Systems and Applications: Why is this a Concern?
Legacy systems are mission-critical, but obsolete business processes and technologies. When PCs took over the business, mainframe software was referred to as "legacy apps".
"Legacy applications can be anything that the new kids don’t want to play around with." This technical definition is the most accurate because it ultimately defines sustainability, maintainability and how much technical enthusiasm will be present during the application development process.
Legacy systems can only be used for their original purpose. It is much more difficult and costly to integrate with modern technology.
"The greatest problem with legacy applications is losing this symbiotic relationship."
Why Should Legacy Software be Retired?
It only matters if we can sustain and support it. "What really matters is the manufacturer's end-of-life and how much risk you are willing to accept." Imagine running an 8-bit computer built and still in use today.
It is much easier to find programmers than to find technicians who can build the vacuum tubes required for the system. Your legacy systems have taken time, money, effort, and expense. As a business, it's normal to be concerned about changes in your legacy systems.
You need to recognize that your legacy system may be at a maturity level and facing challenges such as:
- Inadequate security.
- Performance is slow and inefficient.
- Incapacity to support business growth.
- You need support for the most recent technology integrations.
- Inadequate maintenance support.
These are the challenges you face with legacy systems. Consider legacy system modernization. Why? Modernizing legacy applications will optimize their monolithic architecture with modern cloud-based applications that offer scalability, agility, speed, security and efficiency.
This blog will help you understand how legacy application modernization services can help improve your outdated technology and provide modern solutions that adapt to your changing requirements.
What's Legacy Application Modernization?
Modernizing legacy applications is a dynamic process that rehosts, replatforms, or refactors outdated business technology in modern environments.
Modernizing legacy applications allows businesses to update and optimize their technology systems in order to increase agility, improve operational efficiency, overcome limitations with technology scaling ability, and achieve optimal security.
Modernizing legacy applications can help your business create new value by optimizing them with modern capabilities and features.
This smart approach allows older legacy technology systems to be compatible with modern, more advanced solutions.
Consumers today expect a digital experience that is high-quality. A business' success depends on the rapid delivery of software products and services.
Many organizations struggle to adapt to a digital world that is changing rapidly and still rely on outdated legacy systems.
Older architectures and methodologies are used to build legacy applications. These applications often lack the flexibility and agility to meet today's digital demands.
They require help in integrating with modern technologies such as the cloud. They can also create bottlenecks that stop companies from innovating quickly enough and releasing products to the market.
Legacy apps can cause problems for companies due to increased maintenance costs and lack of developer or vendor support. Businesses must move to modern applications in order to remain competitive. We'll be examining main differences between modern and legacy applications.
What are Modern Applications?
Modern applications employ agile development methods, DevOps practices and modular application re-architecture.
They also use serverless operational models. They are more agile, scalable, portable, and resilient than legacy applications. They enable organizations to innovate faster and reduce time to market and the total cost of ownership.
Modern applications can scale on demand and handle millions of users across multiple platforms. They can also run on cloud-based and on-premises environments.
Modern application development eliminates much of the overhead involved in legacy application development. This allows teams to focus on the business logic and create higher-quality applications.
Key Differences between Legacy and Modern Applications
Shorter Development Life Cycles
Traditional methods are more difficult to update and develop legacy applications. New feature releases and development cycles can take several months, if not years.
Traditional development processes like the waterfall approach follow a sequence. The process begins by defining the requirements for the entire project. Next, create the architectural models and project documents to write the code.
This process should be re-evaluated when requirements change so developers can code new requirements. This makes it difficult to release software quickly.
Modern application development has a major difference in agile development practices, DevOps and continuous integration/delivery processes (CI/CD), which allow developers to release their applications in shorter, continuous cycles.
Agile and DevOps practices promote close collaboration between operations and development teams. This allows for a smoother and faster transfer of applications from development to production, without compromising security, quality, and stability.
Continuous integration (CI), automates repetitive and manual build, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Continuous delivery (CD), seamlessly guides the application through each stage of the pipeline until it is released.
These technologies and agile practices contribute to a shorter development cycle for applications.
Based on Cloud Infrastructure
Legacy applications are server-centric and can only be developed and deployed on-premises. They are usually OS-dependent and need a specific environment including servers and network hardware, databases and storage resources.
It is difficult to scale and migrate an application to a new infrastructure because of the close relationships between it and its underlying operating systems, storage, hardware, and support services.
It becomes more difficult and more costly to maintain the legacy application's underlying infrastructure.
Cloud environments are more flexible and scalable than traditional apps. Cloud-native architectures enable developers to abstract their application from its dependencies by using managed services such as computing, memory and storage from cloud providers.
Cloud services like storage as a Service (STaaS), containers and a Service (CaaS), and functions as a Service (FaaS) can be used by developers to make apps more scalable.
Cloud solutions can speed up application development by distributing resources across multiple environments. Cloud solutions can house resources in public cloud services, as well as in private on-premises clouds for greater security.
Hybrid-cloud architectures offer the best of both worlds.
Developers don't have to scale resources or provision servers for serverless cloud computing. This is handled by cloud vendors.
Developers can therefore push code faster to production. Apps can scale up or down according to the demand with serverless cloud architecture.
Service-Based Architecture
Legacy applications are typically single-tier software applications, where the codebase is combined with services into one deployment package.
Because of this tight coupling, legacy applications are more difficult to scale as the codebase grows. If one of the components is changed, the whole application must be updated. The functionality of an entire application is also affected if a bug occurs in one component.
Modern applications replace legacy systems' tightly integrated architectures with service-based architectures that are loosely coupled and can communicate via APIs.
These applications are built using modular, independent components called microservices. They can be broken up into smaller services by using these microservices. Each service is independently developed, allowing for more frequent updates.
Containers are runtime environments for microservices that include all the necessary elements to run them. Containerization makes it possible for microservices to run on any platform that can run containerized services.
Modern applications can benefit from decoupled databases, as each microservice has its own database. Microservices and decoupling data allow teams to choose the best database for the functionality they are developing.
Read More: Options To Modernize Legacy Systems
Automated Processing
IT teams need to manually manage legacy applications and servers. Computers are more accurate than humans at diagnosing problems.
In complex situations, they may not be able to properly implement corrective actions. Manual processes can also slow down traditional release channels. Every step is subject to errors and delays.
Modern software development uses automated release pipelines to speed up software releases. Automated processes are used throughout modern applications' entire development lifecycle.
Automation helps increase operational efficiency by reducing human error, and automatically identifying application problems and resolving them.
Automating modern applications can be used in many ways. This includes automatically scaling cloud infrastructure to increase processing power, memory and storage capacity.
Infrastructure as code (IaC), a technology that allows developers to create templates that can automatically be deployed to provide entire technology stacks or application development environments.
Automation is used in the DevOps pipeline for automated code builds, testing and deployment. Modern applications automate traditional development steps to create a repeatable process for CI/CD that speeds up app development.
Examples Popular Legacy Technologies Leveraging Modernization With Low-Code Development Approach
SAP
SAP customers have the ability to customize the core application to suit their specific needs. These customizations can be costly and difficult to update for future needs.
Legacy application modernization is the solution. Modernizing SAP legacy technology using a low-code approach to development unlocks new value. This allows you to upgrade and modify the system with modern capabilities in order maintain or gain a competitive advantage.
.NET and Oracle
Because they deliver the necessary features .NET and Oracle are used to build enterprise systems. It can be difficult and time-consuming to upgrade legacy systems with new capabilities and features later.
This complexity can be solved by modernizing legacy applications. With low-code development, many organizations have modernized and optimized legacy technology built in .NET or Oracle.
Businesses could keep the original technology and upgrade it with new capabilities. With the explanation and examples above, you have a good understanding of legacy application modernization, look at the best time to digitally transform your legacy applications.
When is it the Right Time to Modernize Legacy Applications?
This question is not easy to answer. To replace a broken system with modern technology integration, it takes careful planning.
Enterprises will gain maximum value by following a step-by, systematic approach to legacy application modernization. To answer the question "when", here are some signs your business requires legacy application modernization. It is the right time for legacy applications to be modernized when:
- Your legacy system is not able to adapt to changing business needs and it doesn't support business expansion due to scalability limitations.
- Due to a complex patchwork architecture and hard-coded passwords, your legacy system can become slow.
- Your legacy system can lead to increasing technical debt, hindering your ability to expand and scale your business.
- Security risks can be created by obsolete software or hardware that isn't maintained.
These are signs that your legacy technology is not working well for you. It's time to consider business application modernization.
Moving to a modern system can feel daunting, especially if legacy systems are your familiar comfort zone. Your legacy technology may be showing the above-mentioned risk signs. If this is the case, you should consider legacy application modernization services.
What can you expect from modernizing legacy systems? This is the most important question you, as a company, need to answer before adopting any digital transformation strategy.
Compare the potential constraints to legacy systems with the expected results of modernization.
What can you Expect From Legacy Modernization?
Legacy modernization allows you to revive and transform your business technology for the future. Modernizing legacy systems or mainframes is an important corporate decision.
It is also an important aspect of business data transformation, and these digital transformation drives help you achieve your business goals much more easily.
To fully understand the process and potential benefits for your business, you need to comprehend the details. Here are some outcomes you can expect from your business application modernization effort.
- Modernizing your process will help you adapt to new markets and provide a polished user experience.
- Modernizing mainframes makes it easier to integrate larger features.
- The incorporation of the business application modernization strategy increases security and reliability.
- Modern capabilities can be enabled in older technology systems to enable business logic that will drive high performance and accelerate time to market.
- Modernization helps to improve operational efficiency and integrate navigation tools and online help plug-ins.
- Legacy modernisation allows for greater scalability, agility, and adaptability in app development environments.
- Modernization allows your business to adopt the most recent tech designs and tweaks, allowing for flexible IT foundations.
- Indirectly, legacy application modernization can also help increase ROI.
After we've discussed the options for legacy application modernization, let us get to the core of the matter with a comprehensive list describing the different approaches to modernization.
Modernize your IT environment with Future-Ready Application Modernization Services.
How do you Modernize Legacy Applications?
Modernizing legacy applications is a complicated business process. Each approach has its own challenges and rewards.
It is important to choose the best option for your system's speed and cost-effectiveness. Here are the seven R's of modernization approaches or techniques.
1. Rebuild
Rebuilding legacy systems is the most time-consuming and expensive process, but it produces the best results. The other methods can be used to modernize most organizations.
However, rebuild transforms legacy processes into cloud-native environments. This rebuild process includes extensive DevOps and technologies such as APIs, microservices and containers.
2. Rehost
The rehosting method allows legacy systems to be deployed in a new environment, rather than altering code or modifying functionality.
Rehosting allows organizations to retain their legacy processes while also leveraging the cloud infrastructure's benefits. Rehosting, also known as the "lift and shift" approach, allows one to access the google cloud without having to re-engineer systems.
However, this modernization approach must ensure that all cloud-native tools are used to their advantage.
3. Refactor
In hybrid environments, where some legacy systems have been code optimized for performance improvements, refactoring is usually used.
Refactoring involves preserving the functionality and the front end while changing the backend components. Refactoring is a process that many organizations prefer to use because it is less disruptive than a complete redesign.
Refactoring is preferred by organizations because it allows them to evaluate each component of an app and determine if it is the most suitable platform.
4. Replace
This involves removing the current system and creating a new system to optimize business processes. To avoid disruption, the risk is that existing data will not be incorporated into the new system.
5. Retain
This is a rare situation in which an enterprise makes no changes to its environment, and allows its solutions to work as they are.
IT leaders know that maintaining a legacy system is far more important than modernizing it. Organizations must develop a long-term strategy that ensures smooth operation of all components of their apps.
6. Replatform
The process involves moving an entire legacy system to a new platform. The features of the apps are not changed, but re-platforming ports the app components to a new platform using minimal code changes.
Performance can be improved with minimal infrastructure costs. This can be a competitive advantage for the company.
7. Retire
This involves removing the current system and moving users to a new system. Resigning legacy systems often requires a complete process redesign to close all the gaps in the operational process.
CTOs and IT managers must evaluate the pros and cons for every tech-related decision. Your business may be impacted by a decision that worked for someone else. It is therefore crucial to evaluate your needs and the benefits before deciding which legacy application modernization approach you should use.
Are you Looking to Modernize Legacy Applications?
We have given you a comprehensive overview of legacy system modernization and how your company can benefit from it in this blog.
Legacy system modernization can be costly and time-consuming. There are also risks. These risks can be avoided by using well-evaluated methods for legacy modernization. We have put together a checklist to help you avoid modernization risks.
Use the checklist below from our team to avoid the risk of business application modernization.
- Identify and describe the limitations of your legacy systems or applications.
- Consider the advantages of modernizing legacy applications, and set your expectations.
- You should set clear goals and select the strategy or approach that best suits your output expectations.
- Choose the right tech stack to achieve the desired performance and user experience.
- Look for legacy application modernization services at leading providers such as us. Our reputation is built on guiding organizations to select the best legacy application modernization roadmap. Our team can help you with direction and guidance for legacy technology.
Want More Information About Our Services? Talk to Our Consultants!
Conclusion
Legacy app modernization does not necessarily mean a complete overhaul. It can sometimes mean minor alterations to existing systems or even no changes.
It all depends on how your current system functions and whether it aligns with your long-term goals. However, not all disruptions are disruptive.
Many legacy applications need to be updated in order to keep up with today's demands for speed and flexibility. Organizations should use modern applications to invent quickly and provide customer value.
